Facebook adds feeds to profile pages and home page

Last night Facebook launched two new features: Mini Feed and News Feed. While News Feed is getting most of the attention, I think Mini Feed is the bigger change in the Facebook product.

With this update, Mini Feed supplants Personal Information as the dominant module on the profile page. “Personal Information” has historically been the hallmark value-add of Facebook for college students who want to “research” new people they meet a little more. This update prioritizes the friend-monitoring functionality of Mini Feed (and News Feed, which is just an aggregation of your friends’ Mini Feeds) above the research/stalking functionality of Personal Information.

I personally think people will vote with their attention and love this feature. Social dashboards were one of the most popular features we implemented at Standpoint, and I’m glad to see I now get a Facebook friend stream. However, sadly, the feed is not available in RSS, but only accessible within Facebook.com.